Chapter 23: Ethical Skepticism

1. One-Sided Skepticism

Hume begins his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by dismissing "those who have denied the reality of moral distinctions" as "disingenuous disputants" who "really do not believe in the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity superior to the rest of mankind." And he contemptuously suggests that "the only way . . . of converting an antagonist of this kind is to leave him to himself."

Hume may be right in assuming that the professed ethical nihilist is not sincere. But one can think of more persuasive refutations than a mere refusal to answer him. One could point out to him, for example, that if he were set upon by a gang of thugs, and savagely beaten and robbed, he would feel, in addition to his physical pain, something very close to moral indignation.

It is hard, in fact, to find consistent ethical nihilists. When they boldly profess their nihilism, they are thinking of only one side of the problem. They do not see why they should be bound by any of the traditional moral rules. But cross-examination, or their own unguarded statements, will quickly reveal that they expect others to be. And in this respect they perhaps differ from the rest of us only in degree. In fact, morality might be cynically defined as the conduct that each of us desires others to observe toward himself. We do not want others to kill us, beat us, rob us, cheat us, lie to us, break their promises to us, or even to be carelessly late for an appointment with us. And the best way to assure that these things are not done to us, we recognize (when they are not acts that can be forbidden by enforceable law), is not to do them ourselves. In addition to this directly utilitarian consideration, most of us feel the need of intellectual consistency in the standards we apply to ourselves as well as to others.

We might not be going too far wrong, in fact, if we thought of this as the origin and basis of common-sense ethics. I do not mean to suggest that this type of reasoning arose at some particular historic time in the past, but rather that it has gradually evolved, and is a consideration that is continually occurring to each of us anew, half-consciously if not explicitly. Ethics may be thought of as a code of rules that we first try to impose on each other and then -- recognizing the need for consistency, the importance of our own example, and the force of the retort: "How about you?" -- agree to accept also for ourselves.

In brief, people may profess to be ethical skeptics when asked to abide by some moral rule, but no one is an ethical skeptic about the rules he thinks others should adopt in their conduct towards him. And out of this consideration grow both the Confucian or negative Golden Rule: "Do not do unto others what you would not wish others to do unto you," and the Golden Rule itself: "Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you." (Both of these rules are too subjective in form, however, for a scientific ethics. The objective statement would be: It is right to act toward others as it would be right for them to act toward you.)

2. "Might Is Right"

Now the professed ethical skeptic or nihilist will nearly always be found to be either insincere or inconsistent -- when he is not merely being ironical. This applies to the first such skeptic we meet in systematic ethical literature -- the Thrasymachus of the Platonic dialogues, who proclaims that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger." (1)

It soon becomes clear, however, as the dialogue progresses, that Thrasymachus does not believe that this is really justice, but merely what commonly passes as such. His actual belief, as his argument reveals, is that injustice is the interest of the stronger. At the back of his mind he believes, as Socrates does, that the true rules of justice are the rules that are in the interest of the whole community. Perhaps Socrates does not make the best possible refutation, but he does make a very good one. Its most effective point, in fact, is that justice tends to increase social cooperation, whereas injustice tends to destroy it: "Injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting and justice imparts harmony and friendship.... The just are clearly wiser and better and abler than the unjust.... The unjust are incapable of common action." (2) Unfortunately Socrates did not recognize the full importance or develop the full utilitarian implications of this point. If he had, he would have made an even greater contribution to philosophical ethics.

One of these implications, for example, is that even criminals must have a code of ethics among themselves if they are to be reasonably successful when they operate as a gang. Recognition of this requirement is embodied in proverbial wisdom. "When thieves quarrel, robberies are discovered." "When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own." Hence there must be "honor" even among thieves. They must agree to and abide by a "fair" division of the loot. They must not betray each other. The bribed official must "stay bought." The same transgressions that are condemned by the law-abiding community are denounced as "double-crossing" by criminals themselves when practiced against them by their fellow-criminals. This underworld code is the homage that criminals must pay to virtue.

In Thrasymachus we have the original form of the theory that Might makes Right. We have an anticipation of the later ethical cynicism of Mandeville as well as the germ of Nietzsche's master-morality and Marx's theory of class-ethics. But in all these theories we find either a lack of sincerity or a lack of consistency, or a lack of both.

How many people sincerely believe, for example, that Might is Right? In the mouth of the conqueror, the tyrant, or the bully, it is merely the shortest way of saying: "What I say goes! Do this -- or else!" Or, "What are you going to do about it?" In the mouth of the conquered, the victim, or the cynical philosopher, it is the shortest way of saying, "The strong will always act solely in their own interest, and impose their will upon the weak. It is vain to expect anything better." But neither the tyrant nor the victim really means: "This is the way things ought to be. The rules laid down by the strong are always the best rules. This is the system that would work out, in the long run, to the best interests of humanity." And if the tyrant really thinks he means this when he is on top, he changes his mind as soon as somebody stronger comes along and deposes him.

Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Made Public Benefits (1724), while marked by great penetration, suffers from this very lack of sincerity or consistency. Mandeville's thesis is that naturally egoistic man was tricked by clever politicians into relinquishing his own individual interests and subordinating them to the good of the community. But Mandeville never seems quite certain whether this outcome has been good or bad for humanity.

3. Nietzsche's "Master-Morality"

Nietzsche's "master-morality" is merely another form of the Thrasymachus doctrine that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger." But the master-morality is inconsistent and self-destructive. In order that some may be masters, others must be slaves. Nietzsche recognizes this, but he does not recognize its implications. For he does not advocate slave-morality; he despises it. The master-morality is for the "superior," the slave-morality for the "inferior." But who is to separate the "superiors" from the "inferiors" and assign them their respective roles?

Perhaps Nietzsche thought himself capable of doing this, but he was vague concerning the criterion he would apply. Would it be comparative intelligence, or craftiness and cunning (a quite different thing), or physical courage, or moral courage, or will to dominate others, or physical strength? Or would it be some weighted average of these qualities? In any case, what he (or his disciple) would undoubtedly find is that if he arranged men in this order they would form, not two classes with a definite break or gap between them, but a continuous series, running from the tallest to the shortest (in the quality or amalgam of qualities specified), with an almost infinitesimal difference between each man and the next, so that the line would look like the smooth "demand curves" drawn by the economist. The dividing point would be arbitrary. The borderline cases would present insoluble problems. For men in the "inferior" class would be growing into maturity and strength, and men in the "superior" class would be sinking into weakness and senility.

Is each man then himself to decide whether he belongs in the "superior" or "inferior" class? Then, as each man seeks to be admired and not to be despised, all will seek to belong to the master class -- which is impossible. But if each seeks to enslave all the others, then there is a mutually destructive war of each against all, until one "superman" has enslaved all the rest.

Nietzsche does at times seem to favor this ideal. At other times he seems to favor an ideal under which a small class of masters owe certain vaguely specified obligations to their "equals," but none at all to their "inferiors." But who is to decide which are one's "equals" and which are one's "inferiors"? How does one convince or compel anyone else to acquiesce in the role of "inferior"? And if all have the mentality and the "will to power" that Nietzsche admires, if none will ever passively or permanently accept the role of slave, then the only alternative is a war of mutual destruction until only the top superman is left -- after which even he cannot function as a master because there is no one left to enslave.

Possibly this is being unfair to Nietzsche, but this is the best I can make of him. True, his work is full of acute insights. But it is impossible to fit them into a coherent system. His philosophy is made up of rhetoric, rhapsody, and rant; and the only way a coherent philosophy can be made out of this is for the interpreter or the commentator to ask the reader to select this statement or that one and forget all the rest.

The theory that man not only is but ought to be entirely selfish, and give no consideration to others, has certain similarities to Nietzscheanism, and might be thought to require discussion here. I doubt, however, that this can be properly regarded as ethical skepticism or nihilism. It is rather to be classed as a definite moral -- or immoral -- theory. In any case, I have said what little needs to be said about it in Chapter 13.

4. The Class Theory of Marx

But I do believe that a discussion of the Marxist theory of morals belongs here, even though I have a separate chapter ([Chapter] 31) on "Socialism and Communism." For the Marxist theory is something quite different from socialist and communist practice.

Marx's ethical theory is simply part of his general social theory. This is that economic forces determine the course of history. "The material conditions of production" determine the entire "superstructure" of society -- political organization, laws, ideology, culture, art, philosophy, religion and, of course, morals. And since all societies have hitherto been class societies, the morality prevailing at any time has been a code devised to serve the interests of the ruling class.

The reader will perceive that we have here merely another and not very different form of the doctrine of Thrasymachus that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger." The difference consists merely in the greater and more complex elaboration of the theory.

The defects of the theory are quickly apparent (though generations of pious Marxists have been blind to them). It explains the current morality as a mere "result" of the "material productive forces." But it never explains the origin of the "material productive forces" themselves, or how or why one "mode of production" is superseded by another. Obviously the changes in "modes of production" are brought about by human thought, (3) but this never seems to have occurred to Marx. It is true, of course, that once one man has improved a productive method or process, other people see the improvement and this leads to further improvements and further ideas. It is likewise true that our physical environment affects our ideas: a child who grows up in a world of telephones and electric lights, automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, intercontinental missiles and space probes, computers and automation, will not have precisely the same outlook on life as a child who grew up in a world of windmills and ox-carts. But this is an entirely different thing from saying that there is a merely one-way causation from an (uncaused?) "material productive force" to human thought or a definite set of ideas. Man determines and creates his technological environment far more than that environment, in turn, influences him. But Marx was himself deeply influenced by the fashionable philosophic "materialism" of his time.

Another difficulty with the Marxist moral theory (which is much less a moral theory than a theory of how moral theories originate) is the whole Marxist concept of an economic "class." In the Marxian schematism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism form an ascending economic and moral series which will culminate in socialism. The first three are all called "class" systems; only the last is the "classless" society. This schematism is not only arbitrary, but palpably unreal. Slavery and feudalism are, indeed, class systems, even caste systems. But what distinguishes the system that Marx labeled capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, free markets, and freedom of contract) is precisely that it broke up the old system of status and introduced mobility and fluidity into economic and other human relations. In a word, it moved toward the classless society. The transition was slow; but nobody could any longer be counted upon to stay put, to "know his place," to aspire to nothing beyond the status and occupation to which he was born. It is rather the socialist society, with its ruling bureaucracy, and its assignment of each individual by a monopolistic employer, the state, to his specific job and role and rank, as in an army, that marks a return toward a class society.

Marx's class theory faces the same schematic difficulty as Nietzsche's Superman theory. If you arrange men in a series on the basis either of wealth or income, from the lowest income receiver to the highest, then the line would run in a smooth curve with a barely perceptible difference between each man and the next. Just where would the dividing line between "classes" be drawn? Who would be the richest proletarian and who would be the poorest capitalist? And would not today's class division have to be changed tomorrow? The problem is not escaped by Marx's customary division of "capitalists" and "workers," employer and employed, "exploiters" and "exploited." For, on the one hand, the highly-paid motion picture star or president of a big airline may be merely an employee, and hence, by definition, an exploited wage slave, while a barber in business for himself, who hired one additional barber (providing him with a customer's chair and a pair of scissors), would be a "capitalist" and an "exploiter." To speak of a "proletariat" in the Marxist sense in modern-day America has become so ridiculous, with its 80,000,000 automobiles and its 75,000,000 telephones, that even Communists blush to do it.

But even if one could find such a class division, the interflow between them is so great that it is absurd to speak of a moral ideology peculiar to each class.

A further reply to be made to the Marxist moral theory is almost identical with that made by Socrates to the theory of Thrasymachus. When the latter declared that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger" he tacitly assumed that the stronger always infallibly knew what their true interests were. Socrates simply pointed out that they could be mistaken. So Marx's class theory of morals tacitly assumed that the bourgeoisie infallibly know precisely what moral code is in their own interest as a class. He never learned that people, whether "bourgeoisie" or "proletarians," do not act in accordance with their interests, but in accordance with what they think is their interests -- which may be merely in accordance with their illusions.

One further aspect of Marx's ethical theory deserves mention. It is only another form of "moral positivism" -- the theory that there is no moral standard but the one that exists. But as an "historicist" moral theory, it does not hold, like ordinary moral positivism, simply that might is right, but rather that COMING might is right. The future is substituted for the present. Popper calls this theory a kind of "moral futurism." (4)

It is hard to refrain, finally, from one or two ad hominem arguments, for in this case they are slightly more than that. Marx and Engels held that the bourgeoisie could not escape from their "class" ideology. But they were themselves both members of the bourgeoisie. (Engels was the son of a wealthy cotton-spinner; Marx the son of a lawyer, and university educated). Neither was a proletarian. How, then, were they not only able to escape from their predestined bourgeois ideology, but actually to formulate the proletarian ideology that the proletarians had been unable to formulate for themselves? (5)

A final point. When Marx and Engels denounce the "greed," the "cynicism," the "callousness," the "ruthless exploitation" practiced by the employers, the capitalists, and the bourgeoisie, they do not appeal to any new proletarian code of morality. They base their moral indignation and rest their case against capitalism on moral standards and moral judgments assumed to be already common to all classes. (6)

5. The Freudian Ethic

There is some question whether "the Freudian ethic" should be regarded as a special ethical system or as an anti-ethical system. I am referring here not to the ethical views explicitly propounded by Freud himself at various times, but to the ethics implied in popular "Freudianism," with its hostility to self-restraint and self-discipline in all forms and its tolerance of self-indulgence and irresponsibility. An examination of this would carry me to excessive length, and I will content myself with referring the reader to the instructive analysis by Richard LaPiere in The Freudian Ethic. (7)

Professor LaPiere defines "the Freudian ethic" as the idea that man cannot and should not be expected to be provident, self-reliant, and venturesome, but that he must and should be supported, protected, and socially maintained. He contends that this ethic is being spread in America through "the permissive home" and "the progressive school," that it stresses "adjustment" and security, and that it is used to condone crime and social incompetence. In this view the criminal is merely "sick"; he invariably requires psychiatric "treatment" and never punishment; he is not personally responsible for his actions; he is the victim of "society," with the stresses and strains and repressions that its rigorous moral code puts upon him; and any attempt to make him live in accordance with this moral code will turn him into a complex-ridden, guilt-ridden neurotic. There can be little doubt that this "ethic" has encouraged the spread of lawlessness and juvenile delinquency.

While leaving the detailed examination of this attitude to Professor LaPiere, I should like to say a word of my own about a somewhat related "ethic," that of the celebrated Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the author (with W. B. Pomeroy and C. E. Martin) of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (8) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. (9) These books gave everybody an opportunity to satisfy his prurient curiosity under the comforting assurance that he was not reading pornography but "science." This is not the place to ask just how "scientific" the Kinsey report actually was, or how trustworthy its statistical methods and conclusions. I wish here merely to examine its implied moral philosophy, which I shall call the Statistical Theory of ethics. Much sexual conduct is considered "immoral," declared many admirers of Dr. Kinsey's work, because people did not know, prior to this study, just how widely practiced it was, but now that we have found out, it is obvious that we can no longer call it immoral.

Suppose we extend this reasoning into other fields than sexual conduct. If we found that the amount of lying, cheating, stealing, vandalism, assault, mugging, and murder were greater than we had previously supposed, or if those forms of conduct were to become more frequent or prevalent, would that make them less immoral? Whether any form of conduct is to be called moral or immoral does not depend upon its frequency, but upon its tendency to lead to good or bad results for the individual and the community.

6. Haphazard Skepticism

While skeptical and cynical statements are constantly being made about morality, few of them form part of a coherent and consistent philosophy. I shall call these random or haphazard skepticism. Precisely because such skepticism is not systematically developed, it is hard to refute. It may be asked, indeed, whether it is worth trying to refute it. To analyze every such random remark would be an endless task, and an appallingly repetitious one. Yet this haphazard ethical skepticism is so frequently met in our era, and is so widely regarded as evidence of profound wisdom, insight, or originality, that it may be useful to take one or two samples for examination.

This random skepticism is commonly found, not among professional philosophers, but among literary men. Every eminent literary man today is expected to be not only a good storyteller, and a wit and a stylist, but to have his own special "philosophy of life." Sooner or later he is tempted to set up shop as a philosopher, and often (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre) as head of a new philosophic cult or "school."

One such home-made philosopher was the late Theodore Dreiser. His philosophy was typified by his frequent remark that "Man is a chemism." Now if this meant merely that man's body is made up of chemical constituents, and that the nature and changes of these constituents in some way, still only fragmentarily understood, affect his energy, actions, thoughts, emotions, character, and whether he lives or dies, he would have been saying what was true but also what was commonly known. But if he meant, as he seemed to, that man is nothing but a "chemism," he was saying something that he did not know to be true. He was guilty of what logicians would call the fallacy of reduction, and the fallacy of simplism or pseudo-simplicity. (10) Even some logical positivists might point out that no conceivable series of experiments could conclusively prove that man is nothing but an aggregation of chemicals, and therefore by their logic they would have to call Dreiser's contention meaningless or nonsensical. This applies to all materialism or panphysicalism which, as we have already seen, (11) is a metaphysical dogma and not a "verdict of science."

I turn now to a writer far more sophisticated than Dreiser, one who has a background of philosophic reading and who writes a prose of rare lucidity and charm -- W. Somerset Maugham. I shall take a few samples of his philosophy as they appear in that fascinating book, The Summing Up. (12)

"There is no reason for life," we find Maugham writing (on page 276), "and life has no meaning." What does this sentence mean? How does Maugham know that there is no "reason" for life? How would he go about proving this? How would anyone, for that matter, go about disproving it? What would be the "reason" for life if there were one? And what, in turn, would be the reason for the reason, and so ad infinitum?

Maugham apparently here uses the word reason as a synonym for purpose. But purpose is a purely anthropomorphic concept. Purpose applies only to the use of means to attain ends. The means we employ are explained in terms of the end we have in view. Human beings can have a purpose; means have a purpose; but ends cannot have a purpose, precisely because they are ends. An omniscient and omnipotent Being, the Creator of the Universe, would not have to use means to attain ends. He need have no purpose. He would certainly not have to use elaborate means to attain some far-off end; He would not require millions of years, He would not even require time at all, to achieve his end; He could simply will it immediately. To demand a reason for life is like demanding a reason for happiness. Life no more needs a reason than health or happiness or satisfaction needs a reason.

The same kind of comment must be made about the second half of Maugham's statement: "Life has no meaning." What does Maugham mean by "meaning" in this context? This word too seems to be used here as a synonym for purpose. What would life need, in Maugham's view, to give it a "meaning"? What experiments, procedures, or tests could be devised to prove that life has a "meaning" or that it doesn't have? Why does life need a "meaning" beyond itself? I am tempted to say, with the logical positivists, that the sentence "Life has no meaning" is itself meaningless.

Maugham goes on in this vein and writes again of "the senselessness of life" (13) and "the meaninglessness of life." (14) But I call this random skepticism because there is no attempt to follow it out consistently. On the very next page we are told that "the wisdom of the ages" has selected three values as "most worthy," and: "These three values are Truth, Beauty and Goodness." (15) How such values can exist in a meaningless and senseless world we are not told. But in an especially interesting section, in discussing Platonism and Christianity, Maugharn makes an instructive distinction between "love" (in the sense of sexual love) and "loving-kindness." "Loving-kindness," he tells us, "is the better part of goodness.... Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion." (16) This seems to place him definitely among the moralists, almost among the Kantian moralists. But two pages farther on he is back again among the Skeptics: "But goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy chance if happiness results." (17) This is dismissing utilitarianism rather summarily. Right action can be action made in accordance with rules that experience has shown to be most likely (though not certain) to promote the happiness of the individual or society in the long run -- or, to put it negatively, that are most likely to minimize the unhappiness of the individual or society in the long run. One of Maugham's fallacies here is a frequent fallacy of opponents of utilitarianism -- that of forgetting its negative corollary. Right action is necessary to the attainment of happiness but not sufficient.

7. Logical Positivism

I have reserved until last consideration of the most plausible and influential attack on ethics in our time -- that of the logical positivists. This attack has been made by a number of writers and in many forms; but the most slashing onslaught in English has come from Alfred J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic. (18) This attack was made nearly thirty years ago. The controversy stimulated by it has continued ever since, and has given rise to a formidable literature. But precisely because Ayer's attack was so unqualified and unequivocal, I think we can do most to clarify the issues it raises by first examining it in the form in which he originally made it.

The contention of Ayer is not that the propositions of ethics are untrue, but that they are meaningless -- that they are literally nonsense. They are mere "ejaculations," commands, shouts, squeals, or noises which do nothing but express the emotions of the speaker, his approval or disapproval. They "are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.... They are mere pseudo-concepts.... If now I ... say, 'Stealing money is wrong,' I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning...." (19)

We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgments. It is not because they have an "absolute" validity which is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no sense in asking whether what it says is true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth or falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable -- because they do not express genuine propositions.... Ethical judgments have no validity. (20)

Before we deal with these specific statements, it is perhaps necessary to say a few words about the philosophy of logical positivism in general. As this has been elaborated in many and often lengthy books, it would be obviously a little difficult to refute it satisfactorily in a few paragraphs. Fortunately, however, the task of refutation has already been done, and out of several excellent refutations I should like to refer the reader to the late Morris R. Cohen's Preface to Logic, (21) and to Karl R. Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (22)

I shall not even undertake to summarize Cohen's argument here, but I shall indicate its general lines. The central thesis of logical positivism is that no statement that is not "verifiable" (outside of a "tautology") can have any meaning at all. Cohen's argument deals with the theory as elaborated by Rudolph Carnap, on whose writings Ayer's attack on ethics is based. I quote a few scattered sentences from Cohen's comments:

Carnap and others deny that any unverifiable proposition has meaning. This seems at the outset a violent tour de force. We do not ordinarily think the meaning of anything is identical with its verifiable consequences.... Thus Carnap's assertion that unverifiable statements are meaningless is not itself verifiable....

The fundamental error of the positivists arises from the fact that they view the world solely under the categories of determinate existence and nonexistence, losing sight of the twilight zones in which most of our statements are made. They paint the world exclusively black or white to the utter neglect of the grays or other intermediate colors....

We may conclude that the realm of meaning is broader than the realm of propositions.... It is not true that without verification propositions are utterly meaningless....

You may identify the words meaningful and physical by an arbitrary definition or resolution. But the difference between what is ordinarily meant by meaning and by physical existence cannot thereby be wiped out....

Logical analysis, as practiced by Carnap, seems to be another term for what used to be called the fallacy of division. Thus Carnap tries to do away with the possibility of metaphysics or ethics by trying to show that they are neither empirical, nor a priori, nor tautologous, nor instances of logical analysis. In point of fact, even the wildest metaphysics contains many empirical elements as well as purely logical propositions....

There is no conclusive reason why ethics may not follow the ideal of rigorous scientific method -- systematizing not only judgments of existence but also judgments as to what is desirable if certain ends are to be attained. (23)

I do not think much needs to be added to the argument of Morris Cohen or Karl Popper in its full form. If it is necessary to add anything, it might be a few words concerning the necessary role of judgments of relevance and the necessary role of judgments of importance in all scientific procedure. Judgments of relevance and judgments of importance are not only necessarily involved in selecting, out of an infinity of "facts" and possible propositions, the facts and propositions bearing on the particular problem to be solved; they are necessarily involved in selecting the problem itself out of an infinity of possible problems. But the word importance is a value-word, and the concept of importance is a value-concept. And value-words and value-concepts, according to the logical positivists, have no place in scientific procedure or in philosophical analysis! I should like to add just one short quotation from Karl Popper's discussion:

The positivist dislikes the idea that there should be meaningful problems outside the field of "positive" empirical science.... [And] nothing is easier than to unmask a problem as "meaningless" or "pseudo." All you have to do is to fix upon a conveniently narrow meaning for "meaning," and you will soon be bound to say of any inconvenient question that you are unable to detect any meaning in it. Moreover, if you admit as meaningful none except problems in natural science, any debate about the concept of "meaning" will also turn out to be meaningless. (24)

The first logical positivist in the realm of ethics, in fact, was not Ayer, or Carnap, or Moritz Schlick, or Wittgenstein, or even Comte or Saint-Simon, but Falstaff. Falstaff showed by linguistic analysis that "honor" was a meaningless sound:

Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour; what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. It is insensible, then? yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (25)

In one point, of course, the logical positivists are right. You can only verify or refute a proposition, or an alleged statement of fact. You cannot verify or refute a value. You can only recognize a value, or feel it, or tacitly accept or assume it, or explicitly reject it. You cannot prove that a beautiful world is better than an ugly world. You cannot prove that a life that is shared, rich, happy, civilized, and long is any better than a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Extreme logical positivism would leave no room for, and attach no meaning to, beauty or ugliness, health or sickness, pleasure or pain, happiness or misery, good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse. These concepts or categories are not tautologies; they cannot be measured or weighed; there are no physical experiments that can prove or disprove their existence. True, you can show that if you tear a child's arm from its socket, the child will scream or faint or die. But you cannot prove that there is anything "cruel" or "horrible" or "wrong" or even "harmful" or "undesirable" in this, because these words are mere value-judgments, i.e., "ejaculations," nonsensical expressions of disapproval, meaningless noises.

The extreme logical positivists talk as if the only purpose of life is to verify or refute propositions, and as if everything else is to be tested or judged by science. But they forget to ask themselves: What is the purpose of verifying propositions?

What is the purpose of science? What is the purpose of learning the truth about anything? What is the use of it? In a word, what is the value of it?

The answer to this question is tacitly taken for granted by the logical positivists. The answer is in their minds, but never mentioned, never explicitly uttered. No, I am wrong; it is sometimes uttered, but absentmindedly, and without recognizing the implication of the answer. It is uttered by Ayer, who explicitly recognizes its crucial importance. "Actually," writes Ayer, at one point in Language, Truth and Logic,"we shall see that the only test to which a form of scientific procedure which satisfies the necessary condition of self-consistency is subject, is the test of its success in practice." (26)

But what, if anything, does this sentence mean? What is the meaning of the word "success"? How do you prove that something is a "success" or a "failure"? What are the physical characteristics of "success"? How long, wide, and thick is it; how hard is it; how much does it weigh? Ayer has committed the cardinal positivist sin. He has used a mere value-word, and used it as if it actually meant something.

But, says Ayer, "success" enables us to "predict future experience, and so to control our environment." We answer, like a more consistent positivist: So what? What is the purpose of "controlling our environment" if not to make conditions more satisfactory to ourselves, if not to fulfill more human desires, if not to produce an environment that more nearly meets our approval? Even our "mere" approval?

So even Ayer, after having ostentatiously thrown out "value" because we cannot establish its "truth," finally admits, inadvertently, that we seek Truth itself primarily because it has Value for us. Truth-seeking is a means to an end, as ethics is a means to an end. And the end is to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory state.

The reader who has prior knowledge of this controversy may ask at this point why I have confined my answer to the logical positivists' attack on ethical judgments in the very vulnerable form in which it was made by A. J. Ayer in 1936. Not only has Ayer himself since substantially modified his position, it may be urged, but a full-length and far more formidable presentation of the "emotivist" argument has since been made by Charles L. Stevenson in Ethics and Language, (27) not to speak of Paul Edwards in The Logic of Moral Discourse (28) and scores of presentations of still other forms of the theory.

My answer would be that this chapter is devoted to ethical skepticism. I have centered my discussion on Ayer's 1936 attack because that was so extremely skeptical and even derisive. But though I have no wish to take up at great length a linguistic problem that seems to me already to have received such disproportionate attention in the ethical literature of the last thirty years, (29) I suppose I must in justice, now that I have gone this far, say something of Ayer's later writing and of the theory in the form presented by C. L. Stevenson.

Ayer returned to the subject in an essay "On the Analysis of Moral Judgments" in his Philosophical Essays. (30) In this he concedes at one point that: "To say, as I once did, that these moral judgments are merely expressive of certain feelings, feelings of approval or disapproval, is an over-simplification." (31)

But he fails to make clear either the nature or extent of that "over-simplification." And he still goes on to assert that his theory of moral judgments "is neutral as regards all moral principles" (32) -- a lily that needs no gilding by me.

"Does not the promulgation of such a theory," he goes on to ask, "encourage moral laxity? Has not its effect been to destroy people's confidence in accepted moral standards? And will not the result of this be that something mischievous will take their place?" (33) I think we must answer: "To the extent that his theory is taken seriously, Yes."

Ayer cannot see that this answer follows. "My own observations," he protests, "for what they are worth, do not suggest that those who accept the 'positivist' analysis of moral judgments conduct themselves very differently as a class from those who reject it." (34)

I am willing to believe that this is true. I do believe that it is true. I am not accusing the logical positivists of moral turpitude but of intellectual error. But I suggest that the reason they are just as moral as most of the rest of us is that they do not take their own analysis too seriously. In this respect they are the analogues in the moral realm of the philosophical idealists in the physical realm. The idealist solemnly affirms that only minds or mental events exist, and that the furniture in his room, for example, "exists" only because and to the extent that he perceives it. Nevertheless, if he has to get up in the middle of the night in pitch dark, he will grope his way as cautiously as the crudest materialist, for fear of stubbing his toe or bumping his shins against an unperceived chair. For he cannot (fortunately for him) get rid of his "animal faith" that the unperceived furniture "really" exists and can hurt him. Just so, the logical positivists, in the moral realm, cannot quite shed the results of their upbringing or shrug off the disapprobation by their fellows (or even the disapprobation by themselves) that would be certain to follow the commission of an immoral act. But if they took their skeptical views with entire seriousness, and if they persuaded a sufficient number of others to do the same, morality would undoubtedly be undermined and irreparable mischief would be done. Ethical theorizing must be serious and responsible. It is not a philosopher's plaything.

And Ayer, by a glaring inconsistency in his final paragraph, reveals that he does not take his own theory with entire seriousness. "If it could be shown," he writes, "as I believe it could not, that the general acceptance of the sort of analysis of moral judgments that I have been putting forward would have unhappy social consequences, the conclusion drawn by illiberal persons might be that the doctrine ought to be kept secret. For my part I think that I should dispute this conclusion on moral grounds." (35)

Moral grounds? What moral grounds? Whose moral grounds? Isn't this the same A. J. Ayer who has been telling us that moral judgments are "mere ejaculations"? That they are unverifiable and hence "meaningless"? And who has just told us in the preceding paragraph that his theory is "neutral as regards all moral principles"? What could his "moral" argument possibly be? Would he merely resort to the same kind of meaningless ejaculations he has just been deriding?

With this non sequitur Ayer throws away his entire case.

8. Mr. Stevenson's Empiricism

When we turn to Charles L. Stevenson, we find a writer far more guarded in reasoning and far more conciliatory in tone. His Ethics and Language is a real contribution. (36) Though we must reject its central thesis and its underlying "empiricist" philosophy, we owe a great deal to many of its shrewd analyses. Stevenson repudiates the simplism of Ayer, and regards the term emotive "as a tool for use in careful study, not as a device for relegating the nondescriptive aspects of language to limbo." (37) He even concedes that "persuasive methods, cautiously used, have a legitimacy that is scarcely open to question." (38)

Nevertheless, Stevenson is rightly classed as an "emotivist," and preaches an empiricism that would make true ethical understanding and progress impossible. He talks as if nothing had yet been firmly established in ethics, and as if it must be left to future writers whose "slow results will be cumulative," to contribute "to an ethics that will progressively come to grips with the issues of practical life." (39) He talks, in fact, in the final paragraphs of his book, as if the establishment of firm ethical principles were something that must wait for a distant future, if it is possible at all:

"Ethical theory is given to the age-old quest for ultimate principles, definitively established. This not only hides the full complexity of moral issues, but puts static, other-worldly norms in the place of flexible, realistic ones. It is the writer's hope that the present study, attentive to the role of science in ethics, but attentive also to the way in which ethical issues differ from scientific ones, will help to make illusory conceptions of certitude give place to conceptions which are commensurate with the problems that they seek to resolve.

"The demand for a final proof springs less from hopes than from fears. When the basic nature of a subject is poorly understood, one must conceal his insecurity, from himself as much as from others, by consoling pretenses.... Living questions are too rich in their complexity to be answered by a formula." (40)

The foregoing paragraphs seem to me to make use of the very kind of "emotive" terms and "persuasive definitions" that Mr. Stevenson has spent most of his book in deploring. How can he be so certain, one is tempted to ask, that we can never be certain? In any case, I suggest that contemporary confidence that at least certain broad moral principles have been "definitively established" is not altogether misplaced. We do not have to wait until future writers "come to grips with the issues of practical life." Older writers have already done so. It has already been reasonably well established that promise-breaking, lying, cheating, mugging, and murder do not lead to very satisfactory social results, and that promise-keeping, truthfulness, non-violence, fair-dealing, and kindness do in general lead to much more satisfactory social results. To say this, of course, is not to disparage efforts toward further progress in both practical and theoretical ethics; it is merely to remind ourselves that we do not have to begin from scratch.

Stevenson's difficulty, I suspect, lies in his special brand of empiricism, with its assumption that only empirical methods are scientifically valid. This assumption must be rejected. In ethics these empirical methods, standing alone, would be frustrating and sterile. In ethics we are dealing with human action, with human purposes, with human wishes and desires, with human choices and preferences, with the conscious use of means to attain chosen ends. Ethics is not a branch of physics, and the methods appropriate to it are not the experimental, statistical, and empiric methods appropriate to physics. Ethics is sui generic, with methods peculiarly its own. But it is, among other things, based on "praxeology," which, like logic and mathematics, is deductive and aprioristic. (41)

9. Ethics Is Not Linguistics

Three-fourths of the recent literature on ethics seems to treat ethical problems as if they were primarily linguistic or semantic problems. This is revealed in the very titles of some of the outstanding books -- Charles L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944), and R. M. Hare's The Language of Morals (1952). Mr. Hare tells us in his Preface, for example, that, "Ethics, as I conceive it, is the logical study of the language of morals." (My italics.) I do not wish to deny that there is something to be learned from this approach. But I do confess that, with a few notable exceptions, I find most of this literature sterile and dreary. Are ethical statements and judgments merely "emotive"? Is it their sole function to have a "magnetic effect" on attitudes? Are they essentially commands, requests, orders? Or are they recipes or prescriptions? Or is ethical language "multifunctional"?

The answer to the last question is surely Yes. As P. H. Nowell-Smith puts it: "[Ethical terms] are used to express tastes and preferences, to express decisions and choices, to criticize, grade, and evaluate, to advise, admonish, warn, persuade and dissuade, to praise, encourage and reprove, to promulgate and draw attention to rules; and doubtless for other purposes also." (42)

But it has taken thousands of words and scores of volumes to get around to this conclusion; and the "emotivists" haven't got there yet. I cannot refrain from quoting Karl Popper once more: "These philosophers who had started by denouncing philosophy as merely verbal and who had demanded that, instead of attempting to solve them, we should turn away from the verbal problems to those that are real and empirical, found themselves bogged in the thankless and apparently endless task of analyzing and unmasking verbal pseudo problems." (43)

I do not want to say that all this linguistic discussion, this hair-splitting and logomachy, has been futile and worthless. It became, perhaps, unavoidable once the challenge was raised. And some of it has, in fact, been clarifying and illuminating. But I do suggest that the discussion of these verbal "metaethical" problems has been grossly disproportionate compared with other and genuinely ethical problems. "Moral" philosophers have become excessively preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with purely linguistic problems. A great part of the ethical literature of the last sixty years has been like an enormous detour in which the drivers have become so fascinated by the strange and unexpected scenery that they have forgotten to get back on the main road and have even forgotten their original destination.

The Great Digression started in 1903, when G. E. Moore published his celebrated Principia Ethica, (44) in which he contended that the word "good" was "indefinable" and "unanalyzable." This became the most widely discussed book on ethics of the twentieth century. Then, in 1930, the digression was carried even further by the publication of The Meaning of Meaning, by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.(45)

"'Good,'" wrote these authors, "is alleged to stand for a unique, unanalyzable concept. This concept, it is said, is the subject matter of Ethics. This peculiar ethical use of 'good' is, we suggest, a purely emotive use. When so used the word stands for nothing whatever, and has no symbolic function." (46) And then in a footnote, specifically referring to Moore's Principia Ethica, they added: "Of course, if we define 'the good' as 'that of which we approve of approving,' or give any such definition when we say 'This is good,' we shall be making an assertion. It is only the indefinable 'good' which we suggest to be a purely emotive sign. The 'something more' or 'something else' which, it is alleged, is not covered by any definition of 'good' is the emotional aura of the word. (47)

And then the Thirty Years War broke out.

The "emotivists," I think, slipped into two main fallacies. Their first mistake was not in asserting that ethical language had an "emotive" function, but in denying that it had any other. And their second mistake was to try to dispose of ethics by calling it names. For the word "emotive" is a derogatory word. Those who use "emotive" language, it suggests, are using merely emotional language; and may even be pretending to be stating a fact when they are simply giving vent to their personal feelings.

If, instead of asserting that all ethical statements and judgments were "emotive," the positivists had merely insisted that they were valuative, (48) they would have been saying what was true, but what few moral philosophers have ever ventured to deny. But the fact that ethical statements are valuative does not mean that they cannot also state facts.

Ethical judgments and decisions do, after all, deal with facts. They deal with actions, which are facts. They deal with the consequences of actions, which are facts. They deal with the ends that people wish to achieve (and it is a fact that people do have these ends) and with the means they employ (and these means are facts) to achieve those ends. True, in addition to dealing with facts, or to stating facts -- "John stole the money" -- ethical statements imply judgments and contain value-words. They are valuative. But this seems a strange reason for objecting to them, or trying to dismiss them as meaningless. They judge the efficacy of means, and the reasonableness or desirability, from the social standpoint, of the intermediate if not the ultimate ends of individuals.

It is not only ethical language that is valuative. All practical language is valuative. All human action implies valuation. All human action is purposeful: which means that it employs means to achieve ends: which means that it must evaluate the comparative desirability of ends and the comparative efficacy of means.

10. What Is the Best Thing to Do?

The prescriptions of the moral philosopher need be no more "emotive" (in the disparaging sense in which that term is commonly used) than the prescriptions of the engineer. Both are trying to answer the question: What is the best thing to do? The answer of the moral philosopher need be no more emotional (49) than the answer of the engineer. Suppose the problem set before an engineer is: What is the best way to connect Staten Island with the mainland? Should it be by a bridge or a tunnel? If a bridge, what type of bridge? How should it be designed? What materials should be used? How thick should the cables be, how wide the arch, how high the towers? What kind of design would look best? Of course not all of these are strictly engineering problems, though on all of them the engineer must be consulted. Some of them are political problems. Some are economic problems -- problems of relative costs. Some are traffic problems. Some are aesthetic problems. But they can all be subsumed under the overriding question: What is the best thing to do? And this, of course, is a value problem.

It may be objected that the moral philosopher does not ask, "What is the best thing to do?" in the same sense that the engineer does, but that his predominant question is, rather, "What is the right thing to do?" The real difference, however, is that the moral philosopher's question must take account of much wider considerations (than, say, the engineer's) -- not merely what is the best thing to do from the standpoint of the long-run good of the agent, but what is the best thing to do -- what are the best rules to make -- from the standpoint of the long-run good of society. But when these wider considerations are kept in mind, the best thing to do and the right thing to do become identical.

To sum up: Ethical propositions are not true or false in the sense that existential propositions are true or false. Ethical rules are not descriptive but prescriptive. But though not true or false in the existential sense, ethical propositions can be valid or invalid, consistent or inconsistent, logical or illogical, rational or irrational, justified or unjustified, expedient or inexpedient, intelligent or unintelligent, wise or unwise. True, ethical judgments or propositions, though they must always take facts into consideration, are not themselves purely factual but valuative. But this does not mean that they are arbitrary or merely "emotive" (in the derogatory sense in which that adjective is used by positivists and, indeed, for which it seems to have been coined). Ethical rules, judgments, and propositions are attempts to answer the question: What is the best thing to do?

And should it be so astonishing that "What is the best thing to do?" should be a different kind of question from the factual and descriptive one, "What is the present situation?" It is the latter, the "scientific" question, that is the derivative one: the answer to it is the means to the answer to the first. The chief thing we are interested in regarding cancer is how to cure it. To answer that, we must first answer such questions as "Exactly what is it?" and "What causes it?" But no one in his senses says or implies that the latter questions are the only "real" ones, because the only "scientific" ones, or that the question "How can we cure it?" is merely "emotive" or "merely" valuative. Yet this is the kind of thing that is being said constantly today, by positivists and others, concerning ethical questions.

The overriding problem of man, from the beginning of time, has been "How can I improve my condition?" (As the individual, in society, finds that his condition is inextricably bound up with that of his fellows, the problem evolves into "How can we improve our condition?") Mankind finds that to answer this question it must first increase its knowledge of what existing conditions actually are, its knowledge of facts, of the operation of cause and effect, of the distinction between reality and illusion -- in brief, its mastery of positive science.

Thus the study of fact and science is, to repeat, a means to the solution of the problem of how to improve man's condition. Ethics is the attempt to deal with one broad aspect of this problem; the individual sciences are a relatively roundabout means of dealing with specific aspects of the problem. But along come the positivists and prove triumphantly that ethics is not a description of existing fact or the discovery of scientific laws; and they therefore dismiss it as "purely emotive" or "meaningless."

This is the exaltation of means over end. The end, how to improve our condition, is treated as meaningless or unimportant; the means, scientific knowledge, is treated as all-important, as solely important. The instrumental and derivative value is rated above the intrinsic value from which it is derived.

To hold this inverted view is to be completely at sea in moral philosophy.

Notes

1. Plato, The Republic, Book I, 338 C .

2. Ibid., Book I, 351 D and 352-B.

3. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p. 353.

4. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), II, 194.

5. Marx and Engels must have been troubled by this question, for they attempted an answer in the Communist Manifesto. "Just as in former days part of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat. Especially does this happen in the case of some of the bourgeoisie ideologists, who have achieved a theoretical understanding of the historical movement as a whole."

This answer may have been flattering to the vanity of Marx and Engels, but it was made at the cost of consistency. For if a few rare spirits can escape from their "class" ideology, why not others?

6. See the article by H. B. Mayo on "The Marxist Theory of Morals," in the Encyclopedia of Morals (Philosophical Library, 1956).

7. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959).

8. 1948.

9. 1953.

10. Cf., for example, Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), pp. 382-388.

11. Chap. 18, pp. 211-215.

12. (Doubleday, Doran, 1943.)

13. The Summing Up, p. 293.

14. Ibid., p. 294.

15. Ibid., 294-295.

16. Ibid., p. 307.

17. Ibid., p. 309.

18. (Oxford University Press, 1936.) Specifically in Chap. VI, "Critique of Ethics and Theology," from which my quotations are taken.

19. Language, Truth and Logic, pp. 150, 158.

20. Ibid., pp. 161, 163.

21. (New York: Henry Holt, 1944.) See especially the section on "Meaning and Verifiability" in Chap. III, and Chap. VIII on "Values, Norms and Science."

22. (London: Hutchinson, 1934, 1959; New York: Science Editions, 1961).

28. Ibid. All the above quotations are from the section, "Meaning and Verifiability," pp. 55-56.

24. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 51.

25. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I, Act V, scene 1. I do not really wish to accuse the logical positivists of immorality (or of sharing the motives of Falstaff) but merely of errors in reasoning. Other moral philosophers have learnt much from them, and have been forced to clarify their own ideas in attempting to answer them. All this has made for progress. I admire the lucidity of Ayer's style and the keen edges of his thinking. But his understandable wish for precision and simplification, with which I am sympathetic, led him into the fallacies of oversimplification, of reduction, and of either-or.

26. Pages 47-48.

27. (Yale University Press, 1944, 1960.)

28. (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1955.)

29. I refer the reader who wishes to find a summary of the present state of the question to the admirable chapter on "Noncognitivism" in Richard B. Brandt's Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959). There the reader will also find a full list of authors, books, and articles pro and con on the controversy.

30. (London: Macmillan, 1954). This essay had appeared earlier, however, in Horizon, vol. xx, no. 117, 1949.

31. Ibid., p. 238.

32. Ibid., p. 248.

33. Ibid., p. 248.

34. Ibid., p. 249.

35. Ibid., p. 249.

36. (Yale University Press, 1944.)

37. Ibid., p. 79.

38. Ibid., p. 332.

39. Ibid., p. 332.

40. Ibid., p. 336.

41. This methodological problem is too large to go into extensively here. For a fuller discussion I refer the reader to Ludwig von Mises in Human Action (Yale University Press, 1949), Chap. II, "The Epistomological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action," pp. 30-71.

42. Ethics (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 98.

43. Karl R. Popper, "What Can Logic Do for Philosophy?" (Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. XXII, 1948), p. 143.

44. (Cambridge University Press.)

45. (New York: Harcourt, Brace.)

46. Ibid., p. 125.

47. Loc. cit.

48. I was about to apologize for this as a neologism, when I thought to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and found it listed as an "obsolete" word dating from 1566. But the meaning was given as "expressive of value," which is the exact sense that I intend. The existing adjective evaluative suggests an explicit weighing or appraisal, and not also values that are merely implied or taken for granted.

49. The word "emotive" does inevitably suggest emotional, and most of the positivists who use it must be perfectly conscious of this. Though they affect to be using "emotive" as a purely descriptive term, it is not difficult to detect the derision that lurks behind it. "Emotive," in brief, is itself an emotive word, designed to influence the reader's attitude. If the word valuative were substituted for it, two-thirds of the apparent force of the emotivists' argument would be lost. They would then be reduced to the contention that all value-words, even in ethics, are illegitimate or "meaningless."

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